Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
Darragh’s beautiful, brown and gold, albeit bloodshot, eyes drill into mine, and I’m struck with a bolt as sudden and shocking as the late summer lightning that burns the air and sears black spots across your field of vision. My lungs seize mid-inhale. I stop breathing oxygen, my body continuing to pump blood on sheer adrenaline.
My wolf howls with excitement and launches herself at the border between us. I stumble. The front door of Abertha’s cottage creaks.
Annie and Kennedy suck in breaths in unison.
The screen door hits the wall with a sharp crack, and the witch emerges.
Her thin form is draped in a flowing turquoise kaftan, her long silver hair matted to the side of her head, an oversized coffee mug in her hand that reads hocus pocus, this witch needs coffee to focus. A cigarette dangles from her mouth.
She squints over at me.
She glances back at Darragh.
Her eyebrows rise to her hairline.
“Shi-it,” she drawls. “Didn’t see that one coming.” Her cigarette bobs, but it doesn’t fall from her lips.
My wolf surges forward, snarling, saliva flying as she slams herself against the barrier that separates us, claws scrabbling, teeth gnashing. I squeeze every muscle in my body, clutch my arms against my chest, trying with all my might to hold her in, to stop myself from combusting into a wolf gone completely mad with jealousy.
Girlfriend does not care that there’s no sex in the air. She wants witch’s blood.
While I’m literally holding myself together, Darragh Ryan raises his eyes to the distance again, furrows his brow, grunts unintelligibly, and without a backwards glance, strides off across the clearing, past the bee yard, and disappears into the woods.
My heart drops like a stone, and my wolf freezes mid-frenzy.
Kennedy’s hoe hits the ground again with a thud. A crow caws high in an oak tree.
For a long moment, the witch, my wolf, and I size each other up. Magic crackles in the air. I sniff the breeze. Darragh’s scent is fading. From the direction of the witch’s cottage, I smell coffee. Beer. Whiskey. Pot. No sex, I point out to my wolf. Grudgingly, she shakes out her bristled fur and stalks back to her corner.
Kennedy, Annie, and I exhale in unison.
The witch raises her hand in an awkward wave. “Planting rhubarb, eh, girls?” she says.
“Yes, ma’am,” Kennedy answers her.
Annie ducks her head and hunches her shoulders. The familiar stench of Annie’s chronic fear mixes with the odor of stale liquor and smoke. I sneeze.
“Where’s Una?” Abertha asks.
“In the greenhouse.” Kennedy and I work it out so Una gets the standing-in-place jobs ’cause of her leg. Una wouldn’t go along with it if she knew what we were doing, but Kennedy and I can be pretty slick when we want to be.
Una’s our leader, but she’s that Declan Kelly generation, too. She’s tough and brave, but still, she’s obviously traumatized and has to work at not being scared of her own shadow.
“Anything you need from me?” Abertha says. She’s looking straight at me now, one elegantly arched eyebrow raised. I drop my gaze, and my face burns.
Kennedy waits for me to answer, but when I don’t, she says on our behalf, “No, ma’am.”
“Well, uh, keep it down out here.” Abertha takes a drag of her cigarette, and without exhaling, chases it with a big gulp of coffee. She considers us for another minute as smoke curls from her nostrils like a dragon, and then she shuffles back inside. The screen door thuds shut.
Kennedy widens her eyes at me as she sweeps her hoe up. I snatch a rhubarb plant from the wheelbarrow. “Ready for another one?” I ask Annie, my voice squeaking, weirdly bright and pitchy.
Annie holds out a trembling hand. I slap a rhubarb in it. Annie has hair trigger nerves, and she has a fear response to basically anyone who outranks us. It’ll take her at least an hour to chill out. Until then, it’s best to keep her busy.
Kennedy’s still staring at me. She catches my eyes and tilts her head in a question. I give her a quick shake of the head. She shrugs a shoulder and lifts her hoe high overhead, swinging it into the overturned dirt with bloodthirsty zest.
We’re all back to work when Annie stammers, apropos of nothing, “Th-they s-say Darragh Ryan’s wolf will rip out your throat and then tear your limbs from your body and leave them stacked in a pile like f-firewood.”
Kennedy and I freeze mid-motion.
“He doesn’t even eat the m-meat,” she whispers, and then once more, so low it’s almost inaudible. “He doesn’t even eat the meat.”
* * *
Kennedy and I don’t get the chance to talk alone until past midnight when the light goes off under Una’s door, and Annie’s bedframe finally stops creaking from her nightly tossing and turning.
We’re sitting in the dark living room, side-by-side on the sofa, doing our usual thing. Kennedy is playing some shoot-’em-up game with human teenagers online. I’m scrolling on my phone, putting things into shopping carts and taking other stuff out.
Kennedy’s cross-legged in baggy athletic shorts, a generic white T-shirt, and the retro red-and-blue striped tube socks I bought her. Her chin-length, silky straight hair keeps falling in her face, causing her to miss shots, and every time, she cusses and blows the strands out of her eyes. God forbid she get a barrette and clip it back. If I offer her one of mine, she acts like I want to hand her a snake.
I tell her that her disdain for girly shit is internalized misogyny, and she says she’d rather shave her head bald than wear a butterfly in it, so we’re at an impasse. No skin off my teeth. She’s the one shooting wide and losing out to some foul-mouthed thirteen-year-old.
“So are we going to talk about earlier?” Kennedy says as she taps and jiggles the buttons on her controller. Her eyes remain riveted on the screen. If Killian Kelly and his lieutenants knew we have a game system, they’d lose their minds. I’m not sure how it’s a corrupting influence, but the older males have really messed up ideas about lone females.
If you have a father or a brother, you can basically wear what you want, do what you want, sit at an actual table at meals. If you’re on your own like we are, you can’t show any skin—including, like, ankles or elbows—you can’t leave pack territory because no one will escort you, and you have to stay hidden in the kitchen or the laundry shack.
So, yeah, maybe I get it. I bet the males think
Call of Duty will give us ideas. Maybe they’re right. Lord knows I’ve wanted to shoot my way out of here a few times.
“Well?” Kennedy elbows me without missing a tippity-tap.
I look up from my phone, drop my head back to the sofa cushion, and sigh gustily as I stare at the ceiling. “He’s my mate.”
“Shut the fuck up.” That freezes her fingers for a second. On screen, blood and brain matter splash across the screen.
“Yup,” I say.
“Darragh Ryan?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit, girl, I heard he doesn’t even eat the meat.” Kennedy looks at me, wide-eyed. I look at her. We hold it together for exactly one second before we both explode in hysterical guffaws.
“Shut up, shut up.” I smoosh my hand over her mouth.
“You shut up,” she mumbles and licks my palm. I squeal, snatching my hand back and wiping it on my pink silk pajama shorts. “Damn, girl. He’s old as shit.”
“He’s only, like, thirty-five. Thirty-seven, thirty-eight, max.”
“Where does he even live?”
“In the woods?” That’s what they say, anyway.
“You can’t live in the woods.” There’s not an ounce of uncertainty in her voice, and she’s right. I like stuff too much. Fashion. Accessories.
D?cor.
“He’ll probably move down here into camp.” That’s how it goes. The mated male finagles a cabin somehow, and the female builds her nest there.
Males are super intense about territory. They like to keep all the females, even the ones with the protection of male family, in the buildings clustered at the center of the acreage that used to be a human wilderness education camp for kids but is now home to the illustrious Quarry Pack, legends in their own minds.
“I don’t want you to move out,” Kennedy says, her face falling.
“Me neither.”
We’re quiet and sad for a moment, and then Kennedy yips like she’s just remembered something. “Oh, shit! Your wolf! Does this mean that she’s ready to come out?”
Kennedy hops onto her knees and faces me, peering into my eyes like I’m an aquarium, and my wolf is swimming around in there.
“Let’s go for a run!” She bounces up and down, swaying the couch cushions, and my ringlet curls swing into my eyes. “We can hunt!”
My wolf perks her ears. She’s listening. I poke around, trying to feel whether there’s some kind of psychic tear in the barrier that’s kept her inside me all these years. I have no idea how this part works.
Everyone knows that once you recognize your mate, your wolf comes out. That’s the order of things, but it’s not like the older packmates give us a timeline or explicit directions or anything. Una would have told us if she knew, but her wolf hasn’t come yet, so she doesn’t know either. Your mate is supposed to be there and see you through it.